9 steps to get started with customer service

Published: 12/17/2010 Updated: 9/1/2011

The nine items in this article cover the basics for getting started working with the Customer Service features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The Resource Center also includes many articles for taking full advantage of the Customer Service features. Visit the Resource Center by clicking Resource Center on the left navigation pane. And, for yet more information, see the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Help.

Your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online installation may use different terminology than what you see in Help. For example, the term "case" is often changed through customization to "incident" or "ticket".

Key steps

A contract is a an agreement for what type of service a customer is eligible for. A contract line in a contract describes the service support to be provided. In addition, a contract line often includes pricing information and how support will be allotted; this is either by total minutes of service or number of cases opened.

If your organization uses contracts, cases opened from the contract record can be linked to the contract line.

After you open a case, you can open activities, such as tasks, from the case record. When you close an activity and record the duration, it is added to the total billing time for the case. You can adjust the billing time as needed. All activities must be closed to resolve a case. When you resolve the case, the total displays.

Queues hold cases and activities that have not been claimed or accepted by anyone. Some organizations have customer service representatives watch a queue for new cases. When you accept a case to be worked on that appears in a queue, the case moves to your In Progress queue. For more information, see Using Queues to Manage Your Activities and Cases.

Closing an activity removes it from your queue. However, you can find the activity in the Closed Activities of the related case or record.

What Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customer information you can work with is determined by permissions and ownership. If more than one person needs to work with a record, it can be shared or assigned. When you share a record with another user, you give that user specific permissions for that record, but you retain the ownership. However, when you assign a record to another user, you are making that user the owner of the record.

When a problem has been solved or addressed to the customer's satisfaction, resolve the case, record the resolution, and enter the amount of time to be billed to the customer.

Before resolving a case, all the case's activities must be closed. If the case is linked to a contract line, the contract must be active and have sufficient allotments to resolve the case. You can only resolve one case at a time.

To resolve a case:

On the Actions group, click Resolve Case.

Resolving a case creates a closed Case Resolution activity.

Tip

View a list of all resolved cases. In the View list, click My Resolved Cases or Resolved Cases.

After resolution, you can reactivate a case to work on it again. This closes the Case Resolution activity as "canceled."